1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to Internet infrastructures; and, more particularly, to search engines.
2. Related Art
Search engines form a gateway to the Internet by allowing users to navigate through the World Wide Web in ways that are unparalleled. New manners of searching of web links containing desired content is that of searching for images in the Internet. Image searches allow a user to search for images that may exist anywhere in a plurality web hosting servers in the Internet. Users may search for images with a wide variety of interests such as business, engineering and scientific research as well as home based general interests.
Search engines typically identify an image result list and sort them based upon search keyword (or, search string) hit accuracy (by comparing words of the search string with that of titles of plurality of images in the Internet based web hosting servers) and prior user selection popularity. The image search results are typically displayed in four rows by four columns (or some other combination of rows and columns), with a ‘next’ button leading to the next image search result page and a ‘previous’ button leading to a previous image search result page. If a user does not find what he/she were looking for in the first few image search result pages, subsequent pages are unlikely to yield useful results.
Often when they search, they have in mind what they expect to see in images. However, searching for an image results in wide variety of images being displayed, many of them hardly correspond to the user's expectations in searching. Many of the images contain adult content which are not desirable in many instances, such as when children searching for images or when searching in front of an audience. The reason for the results not being what is expected is that the search engines only attempt to match the search string with that of titles of images. Therefore, results become vague, many times even 10 pages of results yield very little user desired images.
Desiring to find images of certain kind of beach houses, for example, a user may enter ‘beach houses’ as the image search sequence and may receive a long list of images of variety of houses, people in beaches, page after page. Not getting desired results in the initial page, the user may step through several screens via the ‘next’ button. This again results in many of the same kind of images that were previously unhelpful.
These and other limitations and deficiencies associated with the related art may be more fully appreciated by those skilled in the art after comparing such related art with various aspects of the present invention as set forth herein with reference to the figures.